Prologue: At my Door
We entered as dots in a sentence. Through turnstiles,
With badges, white noise, white paper,
Where old white men, animal in their desires,
Prehistoric in their longing, blank, bland,
Worried emptiness. We thumbtacked
Sunday's comics, lit a bright shrine
Where Lucy tempted Charlie Brown,
Pulled the football away, never gave him a chance.
Gone. Still you see her on the corner. Her voice,
Passes with a stranger. Lucy, off-key, sang hopeful in sitcoms,
Dyed her hair red for love; Madame X.
Broke and broken, a rift of congas,
A newspaper, a hat. Scientific, with
Goddess garb, straight from the stockbroker,
Wings burnt, trapped in the turn of a phrase,
Sold like a Barbie-doll, feeble, wrinkled,
American in her longing—her desire to succeed,
Proud in her rags, supping on peanut butter.
Later, a grocery parking lot, daylight and sleep,
And the dreaming sleep, the long sleep between
Night and darkness.
I am Eve.
Men blame tragedy on women,
Fed our fingers to the scaled-snake.
Mother of Cain and Abel.
I am Eve, rejecting the names Adam gave,
Naming all things anew.
I begin with Lucy.
Originally appeared in Diagram 4.4
http://thediagram.com/4_4/kenning.html
